]]>https://noellemcafee.net/2018/12/03/some-texts/feed/0Noelle McAfeeFear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysishttps://noellemcafee.net/2018/11/28/fear-of-breakdown-politics-and-psychoanalysis/
https://noellemcafee.net/2018/11/28/fear-of-breakdown-politics-and-psychoanalysis/#respondWed, 28 Nov 2018 00:29:06 +0000http://noellemcafee.net/?p=248Continue reading Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis]]>My new book is coming out in May 2019.

Noëlle McAfee uses psychoanalytic theory to explore the subterranean anxieties behind current crises and the ways in which democratic practices can help work through seemingly intractable political conflicts. Fear of Breakdown contends that politics needs something that only psychoanalysis has been able to offer.

In exploring the fear of breakdown that underlies human existence, McAfee creates a genuine intellectual breakthrough—her book is a stunningly original exploration of the political significance of mourning. This is one of the most thrilling books I have read in years.Mari Ruti, Distinguished Professor, University of Toronto

]]>https://noellemcafee.net/2018/11/28/fear-of-breakdown-politics-and-psychoanalysis/feed/0Noelle McAfeeFear of BreakdownFeminist Political Philosophyhttps://noellemcafee.net/2018/10/13/feminist-political-philosophy/
https://noellemcafee.net/2018/10/13/feminist-political-philosophy/#respondSat, 13 Oct 2018 21:44:52 +0000http://noellemcafee.net/?p=245Continue reading Feminist Political Philosophy]]>I’ve been authoring an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy since 2009. I update it every few years. Beginning with this most recent update, published this past week, I’ve got a new co-author, Katie B. Howard. Below is a snippet of our entry. Or go here for the whole thing.

While feminist philosophy has been instrumental in critiquing and reconstructing many branches of philosophy, from aesthetics to philosophy of science, feminist political philosophy may be the paradigmatic branch of feminist philosophy because it best exemplifies the point of feminist theory, which is, to borrow a phrase from Marx, not only to understand the world but to change it (Marx and Engels 1998). And, though other fields have effects that may change the world, feminist political philosophy focuses most directly on understanding ways in which collective life can be improved. This project involves understanding the ways in which power emerges and is used or misused in public life (see the entry on feminist perspectives on power). As with other kinds of feminist theory, common themes have emerged for discussion and critique, but there has been little in the way of consensus among feminist theorists on what is the best way to understand them. This introductory article lays out the various schools of thought and areas of concern that have occupied this vibrant field of philosophy for the past forty years. It understands feminist philosophy broadly to include work conducted by feminist theorists doing this philosophical work from other disciplines, especially political science but also anthropology, comparative literature, law, and other programs in the humanities and social sciences.

]]>https://noellemcafee.net/2018/10/13/feminist-political-philosophy/feed/0Noelle McAfeeRoutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Julia Kristevahttps://noellemcafee.net/2018/10/13/routledge-encyclopedia-of-philosophy-entry-on-julia-kristeva/
https://noellemcafee.net/2018/10/13/routledge-encyclopedia-of-philosophy-entry-on-julia-kristeva/#respondSat, 13 Oct 2018 21:38:14 +0000http://noellemcafee.net/?p=243Continue reading Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Julia Kristeva]]>My entry on Julia Kristeva has just been published in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Here’s a snippet:

Born in Bulgaria in 1941 and an emigré to Paris in 1965, Julia Kristeva is a world-renowned philosopher, novelist and practising psychoanalyst. Author of more than 30 books and a professor emeritus at University of Paris VII–Denis Diderot, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honour, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize and the Vaclav Havel Prize. Her early work, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), distinguished her as a major poststructuralist thinker, especially for its new ways of conceiving of the speaking being as one who is always subject to the revolutionary power of the affective dimensions of language, that is, the semiotic dimension, which, with the symbolic dimension, produces signification. In her major works of the 1980s – Powers of Horror (1980), Tales of Love (1984) and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987) – she developed new psychoanalytic theories of early development which gave ‘the maternal function’ a central role that had been neglected by previous psychoanalytic theories. Kristeva is also the author of numerous works of fiction, mostly detective novels with female protagonists, in which she tries to exemplify some of her theoretical ideas. These include The Old Man and the Wolves (1994), Possessions: A Novel (1996) and Murder in Byzantium(2006). Over the past 20 years she has turned to intellectual biography with the trilogy Female Genius: Hannah Arendt (1999), Melanie Klein (2000) and Colette (2002); and more general social theory with Hate and Forgiveness (2005) and The Incredible Need to Believe (2009). She has also continued her inquiry into revolt with books on the importance of self-reflection, critical questioning and inquiry in works such asProust and the Sense of Time (1994), Intimate Revolt (1997) and the essay, ‘New Forms of Revolt’ (2014).

]]>https://noellemcafee.net/2018/10/13/routledge-encyclopedia-of-philosophy-entry-on-julia-kristeva/feed/0Noelle McAfeeFear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysishttps://noellemcafee.net/2018/08/10/fear-of-breakdown-politics-and-psychoanalysi/
https://noellemcafee.net/2018/08/10/fear-of-breakdown-politics-and-psychoanalysi/#respondFri, 10 Aug 2018 00:36:56 +0000http://noellemcafee.net/?p=211Continue reading Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis]]>I’ve got a new book forthcoming with Columbia University Press: Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis. Here’s a snippet…

A week after Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency, a former student wrote to me seeking guidance because, she feared, she was watching democracy crumble before her eyes. Referencing two of the books we read in a course five years earlier, the first by Jeffrey Goldfarb and the second by Jacques Derrida, she wrote,

Given the current situation I am looking back on all of our course readings. I no longer feel like The Politics of Small Things or Rogues are theoretical. Unfortunately, I am coming to believe these works are now textbooks with potential guidance for the dangerous state of our democracy.

What else might she read, she asked, and what tactical solutions are there for this situation we are in? Her email made me realize that the present book that I was in the process of writing was timelier than ever, that I needed to wrap it up quickly, and that I might change the title from Deliberation, Politics, and the Work of Mourning to the more direct, How To Be A Country That Will Not Tolerate a Dictator—a phrase I learned from those who led the “No” campaign that got rid of the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet. I only flirted with that title, but the idea still infuses the project. In the end I decided on Fear of Breakdown: Politics and the Work of Psychoanalysis, a long title, but one I hope captures the complex relation between primitive agonies and a politics of working through. It took me longer than expected to finish up this book, eighteen months. And in the meantime, the world over, things have not gotten much better. While Emmanuel Macron did defeat France’s extremist party, Le Pen, far right parties have spread across much of Europe and elected leaders in Hungary (which just reelected Viktor Orban to a fourth term), Poland, and Italy. Countries once heralded for their open-mindedness and liberalism are now split between moderates and right-wing nationalists.

To try to understand and address this phenomenon, this book returns to a theme I’ve tangled with before: the relation between psyche and society. Troubles in the psyche show up in the forum, as do ghosts, crypts, secrets, which can pass from generation to generation, as well as fears of breakdown, which can show up any time. Because of these unconscious intruders, politics theory and practice need psychoanalysis.

It is also at the intersection of democracy and psychoanalysis that one can find what crisscrosses both domains, the fundamental phenomena of desire. Desire drives both our efforts at collective self-governance and, as individuals, the choices we make about how to live our lives. From a democratic perspective, the trouble with desire is the one that Marx encountered: false consciousness, how it is that people desire what may in fact be antithetical to their own self-interest. Psychoanalytically, the trouble with desire is that, first, it often operates unconsciously and, second, it is often not really one’s own, at least not in any kind of original way. That is, one’s own desires are often cultivated, manufactured, deposited by the desire of the Big Other, whether society, family, the Man, transgenerational ghosts, crypts, and hauntings. Put democracy and psychoanalysis together and we get the compounded conundrum of finding ourselves ruled by others even when we think we are ruling ourselves. Again, if democracy means ruling ourselves on the basis of our own self-rule (a seeming tautology) then paradoxically when democracy works best we are at the mercy of our own collective desires, which have been deposited in us by our culture, language and history, which emanate from the trickster unconscious, urging wish fulfillment cloaked in distortion. I might ask myself: are the desires I am advocating for my own or are they inculcated in me by the Big Other of the political unconscious—by centuries of wounds, buried grudges, secrets, phantoms, and ghosts? Perhaps “self-rule” is always at bottom other-rule, heteronomously shaped. Perhaps democratic autonomy is a total illusion or delusion.

But there is another way of thinking about democracy and desire. In the mid-twentieth century, Cornelius Castoriadis developed the idea that human beings have the power of imagination to institute something radically new, such as the founding of a country. “In a democracy,” he writes, “society does not halt before a conception, given once and for all, of what is just, equal, or free, but rather institutes itself in such a way that the question of freedom, of justice, of equity, and of equality might always be posed anew.”[i] Castoriadis is both appealing to Enlightenment values of justice, freedom, and equality but also acknowledging that these ideas need to be questioned. This may have been what led him from his early Marxist orientation to a later psychoanalytic one, folding together aspirations for freedom with acknowledgment that we are often strangers to ourselves. Where the Enlightenment holds that human beings should be autonomous in the sense of their own sole discourse, a discourse that is their own and not that of the Other (culture) or others (other people), Castoriadis knows quite well that one’s discourse is never fully one’s own, moreover “the notion of the subject’s own truth is itself much more a problem than a solution.”[ii]

Rather than try to eradicate alterity, especially the alterity of the unconscious, including all the Other’s desires that have shaped it, Castoriadis aims to make use of it:

How could we dry up this spring in the depths of ourselves from which flow both alienating phantasies and free creation truer than truth, unreal deliria and surreal poems, this eternally new beginning and ground of all things, without which nothing would have a ground, how can we eliminate what is at the base of, or in any case what is inextricably bound up with what makes us human beings—our symbolic function, which presupposes our capacity to see and to think in a thing something which it is not?[iii]

Contrary to many schools of psychoanalytic thought, which aim to free the ego from the otherness of the id and the superego (especially the more normalizing discourses of ego psychology), Castoriadis is proposing a different relation between the conscious and the unconscious. Instead of a project to buck up the ego and free it from the other within, Castoriadis acknowledges that we are caught up in webs of others’ discourses to the point that they become our own. And, he believes, these can be enriching. Freedom can come from making use of these rather than trying to jettison them. “The total elimination of the discourse of the Other unrecognized as is an unhistorical state.”[iv]

The work of the early Freud seems to be caught up in trying to abreact the traces of the desire of the Other, to make conscious whatever has been repressed, to work through resistances. As I trace in these pages, Freud’s exploration of how psychoanalysis can make conscious what has been unconscious led him to focus on the analysand’s resistances. Working through meant dealing with resistant defenses that stall the analytic process. This led him from his 1914 essay “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” to his 1926 “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety.” On the way he writes Mourning and Melancholia, where he realizes that the problem is not exactly unconscious repression but internalization of a foreign object. This is key, as André Green writes, “because here for the first time we see that there are some pathological structures, like melancholia, in which the problem is not a problem of representation or cathexis. It is the problem of the object and it is the problem of…the oral cannibalistic fixation.”[v] In seeing the “ego splitting itself in order to replace the lost object,” Green writes, the problem is no longer simply unconscious processes but our relations with internalized others. Moving from a topographic model to a structural model, Freud changed his focus from making the unconscious conscious to working with conflicts between ego, id, and superego. While the early approach seems foreign to Castoriadis’s project, the later Freud fits better. It addresses anxiety, but not an anxiety resulting from repression (the old model), but an anxiety that seems existential, perhaps stemming from birth trauma or some other early agony. That is the Freudian approach I use here as explore what these deep agonies might be, how they give rise to defenses that can be very destructive, and how those defenses can be worked through.

]]>https://noellemcafee.net/2018/08/10/fear-of-breakdown-politics-and-psychoanalysi/feed/0Noelle McAfeeDiet Soap Podcast on Roderick and the Political Unconscioushttps://noellemcafee.net/2018/07/01/diet-soap-podcast-on-roderick-and-the-political-unconscious/
https://noellemcafee.net/2018/07/01/diet-soap-podcast-on-roderick-and-the-political-unconscious/#commentsSun, 01 Jul 2018 22:18:17 +0000http://noellemcafee.net/?p=104Continue reading Diet Soap Podcast on Roderick and the Political Unconscious]]>Here’s an old podcast from 2014 conducted with me by Douglas Lain, talking about the late Rick Roderick and my book The Political Unconscious.

You’ll hear a lot of clips of Rick Roderick in this episode as well as music from the Art of Noise, the theme from the motion picture The Candyman, Charles Ives 3 Quarter Tone Pieces, and Luc Ferrari’s Societe II.

]]>https://noellemcafee.net/2018/07/01/diet-soap-podcast-on-roderick-and-the-political-unconscious/feed/4Noelle McAfeeOn Alfred Frankowski’s Postracial limits…https://noellemcafee.net/2017/11/18/on-alfred-frankowskis-postracial-limits/
https://noellemcafee.net/2017/11/18/on-alfred-frankowskis-postracial-limits/#respondSat, 18 Nov 2017 01:42:18 +0000http://noellemcafee.net/?p=102Continue reading On Alfred Frankowski’s Postracial limits…]]>Here is the text of the talk I gave today at the American Society for Aesthetics’ book session on Al Frankowski’s The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning

Before offering a commentary on Alfred Frankowski’s sublimely monumental book, The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning, let me first share my reading of it by taking up the key elements of its title. I will then offer a Freudian account of the melancholic aspects of the very memorial culture that Frankowski describes without ever using the word melancholia.

Post-Racial

The term post-racial occurs throughout the book as a modifier for all manner of matters: post-racial discourse, post-racial politics, post-racial society, post-racial violence, post-racial memorialization, and post-racial memory; yet it is never taken at face value. Rather, in every use of the term, Frankowski sets it in italics. While he does not comment upon the typography, the meaning becomes clear: post-raciality is not a fact but a trope, one used to hide the reality of ongoing racism, a trope that attempts to erase what needs to be remembered. Its use always marks a contradiction: “The contradictions of post-raciality are clear,” Frankowski writes, “the bodies of the racialized are prefigured in their exploitation and create the material symbols that hold up a society that appears to be post-race and yet are politically thoroughly racist” (9). The effect of this contradiction is material, it leads to “a transition of meaning, in which violence is learned, adapted to, and framed out of thought both in terms of what counts as knowledge and whose lives count as world-historical” (9).

“Post-racial discourse,” he writes, “is always already implied within the ways we represent oppression and implicit in how we perceive and come to know both the oppression of the past and the oppression of the present” (107). Usually this is by way of depicting past oppression as over and reconciled and by neglecting ongoing phenomena of oppression. The past is neatly relegated, the present context neglected.

Limits of Memorialization

Whenever memorials, however well-meaning, are erected in an attempt to reconcile with the past, to announce that things are better now, to provide closure, then memorialization itself becomes post-racialized. Frankowski points to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC, unveiled in 2012, as the first post-racial memorial. It is so, Frankowski writes, in its attempt to situate racism safely in the past, calling for a forgetting of the many struggles to which white society was and continues to be un-empathetic (2-3). Memorial culture attempts to both address and evade violence, but it attempts closure too neatly and too soon.

In Frankowski’s compelling account, memorials fail when they attempt a tidy representation and a reconciliation. “Representations function to both aestheticize the out-moded content, while depoliticizing its context” (39). Such a memorial attempts to halt memory in its tracks. It announces an achievement, an overcoming, and a time to heal old wounds. Pure representation offers a path toward reconciliation: this is what happened, with this memorialization we signal peace, and now racism is no more.

The alternative is to find a way to memorialize that does not evade or disavow ongoing troubles. Frankowski finds the key to this in Kant’s theory of the Sublime. Unlike the Beautiful, which “is a movement away from tension and toward illumination” (72), the Sublime unsettles: it is a “diremptive force” that “unsettles us [so] that we present to ourselves that which outstrips our ability of representation” (89). Where the beautiful becomes silent in relation to the Sublime, Frankowski follows the thread of silence to “develop further…a political sense of mourning” (89). Where there is silence, there needs instead to take place questioning, reconfiguration, and tarrying with what is unsettling, uneasy, and incomplete.

One of the several examples Frankowski offers of this sort of memorial is Billie Holiday’s haunting song “Strange Fruit”:

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

Holiday’s musical memorial, Frankowski writes, “serves to remember exactly what is being displaced in the space of memory” (51). It is not set in the exact past of the lynching, but in the aftermath that takes place in the song’s present. “Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck.” Uncannily, here it still is indeed, too often relegated to a history too easily unnoticed, packed away, post-racialized. Billie Holiday’s musical memorial opens up the past to haunt the present.

Toward a Political Sense of Mourning

The words of the subtitle “toward a political sense of mourning,” recur throughout the book. By mourning, Frankowski has something specific in mind: “[W]e keep our practices of resistance alive by suspending the idea that mourning will bring about resolution—instead we focus on living within and living through our context” (107) … which means “taking up action against those conditions that mark those lives as always already dead to begin with” (108).

As he closes the book, Frankowski suggests that mourning is political in that it is a way to “rethink our strategies, our agency, and our practical relations to concrete forms of oppression” (108). “It is not merely an intervention,” he writes, “but a way of rethinking the texture of our life and the activity of our position” (108).

Mourning begins to look like forgiveness when Frankowski writes that it allows us “to reclaim our political agency by accepting how every person, as a result of our contemporary existential condition, is entangled in processes that produce oppression toward others and result in our own identity as an object of oppression itself” (109).

Melancholic Memorials

So now I turn to my own thoughts on the text, which I have to admit are haunted by Freud, who makes his appearance in a few passages but is otherwise hardly present. I find it curious that in a book on the political work mourning, especially given what Frankowski notes are recurrent failures to mourn, the word melancholia never appears. There is the shadow of despair, there is sorrow and neglect, but there is no mention of what Freud referred to in his essay on mourning and melancholia as the shadow of the object:

Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.[1]

Where in mourning, the libido is de-cathected from the lost object and finds new objects, in melancholia the libido withdraws into the ego, which undergoes an identification with the lost object. The libido is no longer object seeking; it has withdrawn, and with it the shadow of the lost object, where residual ambivalence, unfinished business, engulfs the ego, which then can never be done with the lost object, whose long shadow diminishes the ego’s self-regard. Where true mourning allows for a process of grieving; melancholia forestalls grief and nurtures grievances and self-hatred.

I tread cautiously in connecting this Freudian account of mourning and melancholia to the issues Frankowski is taking up; and frankly I worry that a facile comparison could go badly: that some might call for those who have been wounded to stop nurturing their grievances and move on. That would be a terrible reading. Moreover, a comparison is unwieldy because there does not seem to be a neat parallel: it is not clear that there is a particular lost object for which mourning is called. We have an idea of who suffers a loss but not exactly of what has been lost. The lost object seems to have no name. There is neglect and its sign – longing – but naming the lost object seems impossible. Sometimes all we have is silence.

“The Sublime and mourning are ways of articulating life in relation to the unreconcilability of something coming to an end and still living on at the same time” (92). There are ample signs of the crime, including all those collected in the curious museum of racist artifacts, but what they conjure up is only disorienting, like figures of the sublime that Frankowski describes toward the end of the book, objects that show how blacks had been depicted and objects that still show how these motifs are still at play (88), making sensible what is unrepresentable (93):

The museum does not work like memory so much as it plays off of allegorical modes of silencing. And silence too needs to be thought of in more ways that link it to the activity of resistance, the activity of contextualizing violence and what is lost in our collective past and collective sense of our present. For something to go silent does not mean that there is merely a nonexistent content or a passive content at lay. Silence may also be that orientation toward that which all of the content, all of the words, fail to appropriate. (88)

Of course, while we may not be able to point to a lost object or some particular internalization of its loss, there have been grave losses, traumas, and wounds: the slave trade, the Middle Passage, families torn apart, loved ones murdered and terrorized; Jim Crow, all anti-black racism that continues to this day, have robbed, killed, destroyed, stolen. As Frankowski argues throughout the book, these all call for mourning. But throughout the book I was frustrated by the absence of any specificity about what exactly has to be mourned or when it would be done. Frankowski seems to be calling for perennial mourning, which lies on the border between Freud’s mourning and melancholia. Where the mourner finds new attachments and the melancholic will not grieve old ones, the perennial mourner continues both to hold on to and to grieve its losses. I am not sure if there is a good way out of this quandary. So long as racism stays in the present, then mourning must remain perennial and unfinished.

And as for the absent word, melancholia, maybe its avatar is post-racialization. Perhaps melancholia is not being nursed by those oppressed who fail to grieve but by post-racial discourses that announce no need. Perhaps what is melancholic are not oppressed peoples but whole cultures that encrypt loss in memorial tombs. My way of putting it fits well with Frankowski’s. Recall his account of the MLK memorial as a post-racial memorial that attempts to erase any need to grieve. It attempt to situate racism safely in the past, calling for a forgetting of the many struggles to which white society was and continues to be un-empathetic (2-3). In attempting to both address and evade violence, it seeks closure too neatly and too soon. Such memorials cast a melancholic shadow, disavowing any need for grieving. The work of mourning, then, is a work that needs to be undertaken by all affected, on all sides of the ledgers of loss.

This brings me to a question I had throughout the book: Who is the “we” that Frankowski invokes on nearly every page? Throughout the text, the author calls on the reader to take up the project, using the pronoun “we”—but I never was sure whom the “we” scooped up. In the final pages, Frankowski begins to answer it. “We are oppressed/oppressing subjects, and as such we need to take the oppression of others as matters that imply our own fate” (108). For Frankowski, this involves “suspending the progressive cultural narrative around issues of our cultural violence” (108). (I would like to hear more about what he means here.) He points to a “shared neurosis when it comes to issues of racism” (might this be melancholia?) that can be ameliorated by taking up “the task of reconfiguring our own activity … as a practice of living with ourselves and others and living through our context” (108).

All of us in this we, Frankowski further suggests, whites and blacks, oppressors as well as the oppressed, are collectively afflicted by the neurosis of racism. Might this be melancholia? Working through what gives rise to this neurosis involves the work of mourning, which seems to mean, though he never exactly says this, getting over idealizations of there being saints and sinners, evil and its overcoming, reconciliation and closure. And instead of erecting melancholia memorials, we need to remember in a way that decrypts our collective and internal tombs of loss.

]]>https://noellemcafee.net/2017/11/18/on-alfred-frankowskis-postracial-limits/feed/0Noelle McAfeeHumanity and the Refugeehttps://noellemcafee.net/2017/09/24/humanity-and-the-refugee/
https://noellemcafee.net/2017/09/24/humanity-and-the-refugee/#respondSun, 24 Sep 2017 08:54:19 +0000http://noellemcafee.net/?p=93Continue reading Humanity and the Refugee]]>Recently published in Social Philosophy Today, my paper, “Humanity and the Refugee: Another Stab at Universal Human Rights,” takes up the questions of (1) how the refugee crisis exhibits the fault lines in what might otherwise seem to be a robust human rights regime and (2) what kinds of ways of seeing and thinking might better attune us to solving these problems. There is surprising agreement internationally on the content of human rights, although there is a huge gulf between international agreements on human rights and the protection of those most vital. The subtitle of the paper, “another stab at universal rights,” has a double entendre: in the midst of a crisis that is stabbing international agreements on human rights to its core, I will take a stab at using the crisis situation to point a way forward toward a cosmopolitan social imaginary that uses human imagination, not just as an ability to represent in one’s mind what one has seen elsewhere, but also as an ability to imagine something radically new. This social imaginary points to the necessity of according everyone, refugees included, as having a right to politics and thus a hand in shaping their own world, including their new, host communities.
]]>https://noellemcafee.net/2017/09/24/humanity-and-the-refugee/feed/0Noelle McAfeeDeliberation and the Work of Mourninghttps://noellemcafee.net/2016/04/05/deliberation-and-the-work-of-mourning/
https://noellemcafee.net/2016/04/05/deliberation-and-the-work-of-mourning/#respondTue, 05 Apr 2016 18:52:53 +0000http://noellemcafee.net/?p=84Continue reading Deliberation and the Work of Mourning]]>I’ll be giving a talk in May 2016 in Prague on the following themes.

There are many languages of reason, but perhaps the most powerful and insidious one is the unconscious logic that emerges during political, ethnic, and religious conflict. What may at first seem madness, is, if looked at with the right lens, a very cool calculus of justice aimed at righting past wrongs — no matter how out of scale the “solution.” The unconscious is not mad. It keeps careful tally. It never forgets insults, injuries, traumas, or wrongs. It waits for its moment to set matters straight. And the unconscious of a people traumatized and bereft will bide its time for centuries, if need be, waiting for an opportunity to set matters right. Consider what lay behind the shot that set off World War I: six hundred years of grievance and political melancholia. Psychoanalytic hermeneutics can help make sense of the effects of political traumas. Might it also help people work through them? With his all-too-vague notion of “working through,” which shows up in dream work and the work of mourning, Freud thought he found an antidote to traumatic remembering and repetition, a process that could calm and bind the psychical excitations that trouble the organism. Considering a political body of restless people haunted by past traumas and injustice, what kind of Arbeit can help political communities deal with buried traumas and insults before they explode in vengeance? Without some kind of work, politics becomes an enactment of fantasied, unrealistic expectations; demonic projections; and persecutory anxieties. In this paper I draw on and move beyond Freud’s model toward a post-Kleinian one that can be tethered to the political process of public deliberation. In my account, political deliberation is not just a process of reason giving and consideration, which many political philosophers think it is, but an affective process that helps people work through fantasies of denial, splitting. and revenge and toward a position that can tolerate loss, ambiguity, and uncertainty, that is, the human condition.

]]>https://noellemcafee.net/2016/04/05/deliberation-and-the-work-of-mourning/feed/0Noelle McAfeeNew Paper on Kristeva and Arendt, Inner Experience and Worldly Revolthttps://noellemcafee.net/2014/12/18/new-paper-on-kristeva-and-arendt-inner-experience-and-worldly-revolt/
https://noellemcafee.net/2014/12/18/new-paper-on-kristeva-and-arendt-inner-experience-and-worldly-revolt/#respondThu, 18 Dec 2014 02:58:11 +0000http://noellemcafee.net/?p=77Continue reading New Paper on Kristeva and Arendt, Inner Experience and Worldly Revolt]]> In my new article just published in the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, I ask: What is at stake when political revolt depends upon radical inner experience? Is the only route to cultural and political change, as Kristeva seems to argue, through personal introspection and revolt? If we want more from life than the freedom to channel surf, as she says, need the direction of inquiry be primarily inward? Need there be an either/or of psychical versus public life? Is the only answer to social and political dead ends really found by turning inward? Is the micropolitics of the couch the path to freedom? “Today,” Kristeva writes, “psychical life knows that it will only be saved if it gives itself the time and space of revolt: to break off, remember, re-form. From prayer to dialogue, through art and analysis, the crucial event is always the great infinitesimal emancipation: to be endlessly recommenced.” In this essay I ask whether we might move Kristeva’s “New Forms of Revolt” from the couch to the polis with the help of one of her major interlocutors, Hannah Arendt, who reminds us that thinking is always a plural affair. I develop a link between Arendt’s thinking and Kristeva’s revolt to show how thinking-as-revolt puts subjects in relation to each other and to the political. Such a political culture of revolt can engage in the work needed to move beyond adolescent fixations in melancholic times. And with it we might in fact create more meaning for our lives.